Erdington Contact Case – Grey Visitation, Automatic Writing, UFOs Sighting, Paranormal Activity
Updated: Feb 2, 2022
Birmingham UFO Group Case Report
Author: Dave Hodrien
Release Date: 21/12/2021
Last Updated: 02/02/2022
In October 2021 I met Chris James in a UFO-related Facebook group. He mentioned the fact that he had previously had some experiences. I contacted him and he agreed to share the details with me for the creation of this report.
A Visitation
In November 1975 when Chris was 5 years old he lived with his family in a house on Fentham Road, Erdington, Birmingham. He and his younger brother shared a bedroom at the front of the property and slept on a bunk bed. Chris had the lower of the two beds, while his brother slept on the top bunk.
His parents used to leave the bedroom door open and the landing light on. This meant that the room was quite dark but the furnishings could still be made out.
One evening he and his brother had gone to sleep at the usual time of around 7pm. At some point during the night Chris suddenly awoke for an unknown reason. When he opened his eyes he immediately saw a figure standing in the room about a foot away from the bed. The being was about three and a half feet tall. It had an oval shaped head which appeared to be hairless. Due to the darkness it was mostly in shadow, but the light from the landing lit up the right edge of it. He could just make out the reflection on one of its eyes.
As soon as he saw the figure Chris screamed out in fear. As he did so the figure seemed to drop downwards and move underneath the bed. Chris leaned over the edge and briefly glanced it roll towards the wall and seem to vanish into it. A few seconds later both his parents came running into the room and put the light on, which of course also woke up his brother on the top bunk.
Chris told them that there was someone under the bed. His mother picked him up to comfort him. His father said it must have been a bad dream. Chris continued to insist that the figure was there, so his father pulled the bed away from the wall show there was nothing under the bed. Chris felt sure it had literally entered the bedroom wall so said to him “It went into the wood.” To try and calm him down his father tapped on the wall to show it was solid.
After this they put him back in bed and remained with him a while until he’d relaxed. They then left the room and Chris and his brother settled back off to sleep.
Years later Chris asked his brother about the incident to see if he remembered it, asking him “Remember when I saw that thing in my room?” His brother replied “What? The alien?” This surprised Chris as he’d never referred to it as this. He wonders if his brother had chatted with his father about it and come to this conclusion.
Obviously Chris was quite young when this happened, so the possibility that it was a dream cannot be completely put out of the question. However the shape and height of the figure would fit in with it being a Grey, and I have investigated many other cases where these beings have faded away extremely fast when they are seen or about to be discovered. Chris says the memory of this incident is very vivid and has troubled him for most of his life.
Sometimes shadowy forms can be seen by people when suffering from sleep paralysis. Although Chris has actually experienced this on other occasions, it does not seem that he was experiencing it on this occasion as he was able to scream out for his parents. Usually when people experience sleep paralysis they also find they cannot shout out.
The Apparition
Between 1980-1984 Chris used to go to a boarding school in Wolverhampton (name purposely omitted). He used to stay on the school grounds at weekends along with many other children. There was an old Victorian building which housed the dormitories and sick bay.
One weekend in 1981 they were playing outside and pretending to be soldiers when Chris fell in a ditch and cut open his knee. The teacher took him to the on-site hospital to get stitched up. He was then sent to the sick bay to heal up.
He had to remain at the sick bay overnight. It was quite creepy, with cast iron beds and sounds such as the dripping of taps and creaking of pipes in the walls. He was the only one there at the time, and he found it too un-nerving to sleep. At around 1.30am he’d had enough and decided to go and find the staff member on night duty to ask if he could go back to his dormitory.
He stepped out onto the corridor and walked along it towards the night duty room. Reaching the room he realised the light was off. The only light was coming from a clock on the wall in the corner. He could make out a figure sitting on the wooden chair in the room, who he of course assumed was the night duty officer, as she would often sit on this chair organising clothes for the school children. He asked her if he could go back to his own dormitory as he was finding it hard to sleep in the sick bay. The figure simply replied “Yes.” Please at this response, Chris walked back to his own dormitory and got into bed.
A short while went by when he was rudely awakened by a light shining in his face. It was the night duty officer. She exclaimed “There you are!” Puzzled by this Chris told her that he’d spoken with her and she’d said it was ok to come back to the dormitory. Upon hearing this she told Chris she’d been downstairs doing laundry for hours and had not spoken with him.
Who was the mysterious figure who had not only been present in the night duty room but had also responded to him? There were no other members of staff on duty who it could have been. Chris has always put the experience down to a ghostly apparition, someone who was haunting the old building.
White Orbs
In 2003 Chris lived in a house on Fuller Street, Cleethorpes near to the River Humber. One early morning there was a violent thunderstorm. He awoke at 3am with the sound of the thunder, and decided to get up and go and watch the storm from the back door. He got dressed, opened the door and lit up a cigarette. The gardens in the area had low dividers rather than tall fences. In neighbouring gardens he could see other open doorways with other people watching the storm. After a short while his landlord came downstairs, also woken by the noise.
The main storm clouds seemed to be over Grimsby to the North West. The clouds were lit up in orange light from the town as well as Immingham Oil Refinery further along the river edge. Chris was looking up at the sky at a diagonal over the roofs of the houses on Neville Street.
Suddenly he noticed some white star-like lights moving around in one of the storm clouds. There seemed to be up to 50 of them, small white orbs of light which were darting around. Interestingly they looked like they were under control, as they would never bump into one another. Whenever it looked like two were going to collide they would change course to avoid one another. Sometimes they would enter or emerge from the cloud with a white flash of light.
Chris pointed them out to his landlord, but neither of them could identify what the orbs could be. His neighbours could also see the orbs and one of them joked that they were coming to take them away. They all watched the display for about 45 minutes until the storm finally moved off. The lights seemed to move with it.
After the sighting Chris wondered if the objects had been detected on radar. He decided to ring the police to explain what they had witnessed. Upon hearing what he was describing they put him in touch with RAF Warrington. The person on the phone took down all the information in great detail, then told him that his call had been logged and someone would get back to him.
A couple of days later he received a letter through the post from the UFO desk at the Ministry of Defence. It informed him that due to electrical interference nothing was picked up on radar.
Afterwards someone suggested to Chris that the orbs might have been a flock of birds reflecting light. While this was a good suggestion, it seems unlikely due to the flashes of light which were occurring when the orbs moved in and out of the cloud.
I asked Chris whether he felt the objects could have been ball lightning caused by the storm. He says that the movements seemed too controlled for this rather than randomly drifting. However I feel that given the circumstances, this is likely to be the explanation for what was observed. Ball lighting is rare but can occur under stormy conditions. While it is usually seen as a singular orb down near the ground, perhaps the air was electrically charged, causing many of them to appear in a particular location. This would explain why they moved off with the storm rather than remained.
Alien Script?
On a night in February 2020 Chris had a dream in which he was walking down to the seafront of his home town with some friends. When they arrived the scene suddenly changed and he found himself back in his home playing video games with them.
At 2.30am he suddenly awoke from the dream for seemingly no reason. This is not something he would usually do, he informed me that most of the time he cannot even recollect his dreams at all.
For an unknown reason he felt the urge to draw. At the time Chris was in the process of building a model of R2D2 from Star Wars which was being built slowly out of parts which turned up monthly. With this project he was provided a notepad, and it was this that he grabbed hold of. He turned to a blank page, picked up a pen and began to draw.
He had no idea of what he was drawing, it just seemed to happen automatically. Once he had finished he put the notepad down, got up and went to have a cup of coffee and a cigarette. He thought nothing more of it.
Below are the drawings Chris made in the notepad:
As you can see Chris drew a number of shapes, X’s in specific patterns, a criss-cross of lines, two vertical columns of unusual symbols made up of lines and dots, an unusual shape with other symbols linked off it, and finally a horizontal rectangle with five other symbols in and a keyhole like shape alongside it.
In late January 2022 Chris came across another contact case online which included symbolic writing. This writing reminded him of the symbols he had drawn two years previously. He managed to track down the notepad and locate the drawings. While it was clear that the symbols from the case did not match his own, it made him wonder whether they were ET in origin.
Chris’s drawings are certainly unusual. While the shapes near the top of the page and patterns of X's could easily be put down to doodles, the lines of symbols which he drew and other odd shape with symbols around it appear quite specific and could well be a language of some sort. To my current knowledge they do not match any known language on Earth. While the dream he had did not suggest that a contact experience had taken place, it is bizarre how he woke from it and felt the need to do the drawings.
I have investigated a number of other contact cases where people have either seen or felt the need to draw lines of symbols. While there is no direct match with these other cases either, they highlight the fact that this is a valid aspect of the contact phenomenon. In most instances the individuals involved either do not understand the meaning at all, or have a vague inkling of themes. They are sometimes shown the symbols on a screen, but in many cases see them as a vision in their mind, sometimes referred to as an “information download”.
Conclusion
Chris has had a number of interesting experiences throughout his life. The being he recalls in his room could well have been a visitation by a Grey, there are enough aspects of the experience to suggest this. It appears that this did not lead to any direct interaction, but it is of course possible that he has some missing memories. The symbols he drew in his notepad many years later are intriguing and may suggest further contact, although there was no indication of this at the time.
Both UFO sightings and paranormal activity are regularly reported by contactees. However there is no evidence that either of the later two incidents Chris experienced were directly linked with his initial experience, and I am convinced that the glowing orbs were an electrical anomaly in the storm cloud rather than ET related.
It is great that Chris has decided to get these incidents down on the record, and I would like to thank him for going over them with me. If he has any other experiences going forward and he decides to keep in touch they will be added as necessary.
Copyright Dave Hodrien 2022